Many users of portable computing devices, such as tablet computers and smart phones, play short video games, frequently referred to as “casual” games. As opposed to many computer games on desktop computers or console computing devices which may require many hours to play through a single game to completion, casual games typically require less time to play and may be used for brief periods of entertainment throughout the day.
Casual games exist in every genre, including action games, sports games, card games, and puzzle games. One subset of the puzzle game genre is the “match-3 game,” in which a field or array of icons or tokens are provided to the player. In one common implementation, the player may select a token to swap with an adjacent token in the array. If, after swapping, three or more identical tokens are adjacent in the array, the identical tokens are removed, a player score is incremented, and the resulting empty spots in the array are filled.
Once the initial board or field is filled, typical match-3 games only introduce any randomness when empty spots in the array are filled. In fact, one subset of these games does not introduce any further randomness, and instead have emptying the field through matches to leave the fewest number of remaining tokens as the object of the game. Accordingly, these games may rely more on strategy and long-term planning than luck, which is not preferred by all players.